Through Grandmother's Thicket
by Holly go lightly1
Summary: The ultimate terror of any over-razzed educator with a loathing of children: living next to your absolute worse student. NEVILLE. Could you protect your daughter from a learned man's greatest terror--stupid?
1. She Rolls the Window Down

*I highly believe that Neville needs a little love in his life. And now he's going to get it. So there to all of you who find such an idea repulsive.*

*If you know or read or have even watched the movie of Harry Potter, you'll know the characters that are created by me and the ones by Rowling.

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She Was the Window Down

Neville lolled about in his azure-striped pajamas in the sun-flooded pantry of his grandmother's cottage, stout legs folded quite contently under his rather, well, large backside. His eyes, dull with the glee of the first week of summer break, glided back and forth over a leaf of his new book, _Seldon Ritter and the Pursuit for the Lotus of Pollock_, a birthday present kindly bestowed upon him from his most cherished professor, the benign and maternal Sprout who was ecstatically eager to kindle his love of seeds and soil. 

"Dear?"

"Yesfm, Grndmurm?" he replied as politely as he could about a cheek-full of gruel and sausage. A primary cause for his fondness of summer was he could gorge himself as much as he desired and there were no schoolgirls present there to object, ridicule, or titter over his ever expanding gut. Oh well. 

"When you're done with breakfast, trot over next door and ask to borrow some tea bags."

Neville's eyes dilated and a squeal escaped his fleshy mouth. "Grandmum!" he exclaimed. "Please...not next door, anything but----"

"I don't see what the commotion's about," Grandmother returned in a justified manner. "Honestly, you treat those people like charlatans and convicts. Simply because the breadwinner was in Azkaban for a slight misunderstanding----"

"Yes, Grandma, but----"

"---and Dumbledore combed through that quick and simple, and anybody can see that he was as innocent as a fresh primrose. You haven't forgotten to water them, have you? That is one of your chores. And by the way, Neville, I'd like chamomile and not mint, please. Mint is a rotten, nasty thing for the sinuses."

Neville assented with a brief bob of his skull, perched on its doughy neck, and shuffled upstairs to his bedroom, golden toast flakes randomly drifting off his pajamas as his grandmother's voice plagued him inexorably.

"I think you'd see it in your soul to be a tad more gentle with them. Those poor babes of his, their mother only died...now, what was it? Five years ago. Tragic, it was marrow cancer, I believe. Galatea was such a sweet little thing. Tiny, but sweet. Why, the rest of those people are simply giants! How did they get so large?"

The dread of his impending task was beginning to form a cloudy mesh over his belly, but he continued to dress himself in short slacks, white shirt, and beige robes. He left the door ajar, as custom and gentleman cordiality imposed, and continued to listen to his grandmother's drawl.

"That man should be canonized for undertaking the task of three children! My gracious, one was certainly enough at my age. They all attend that horrid Durmstrang Academy, right, Neville? There has to be something there other than dark arts, I'm certain of it. They're just not that sort, you know? Now...Ludwig graduated just this year, correct? Sober one, isn't he. I think he was employed as a concocter of volatile brews for the Armed Force Board. So intelligent."

Lacing his sneakers with gauche fingers, Neville pecked his grandmother's creased ivory forehead and exited out the porch door, her voice trailing behind him like ripples glide after a small boat on the glassy water.

Trudging through the snarled brush of the tiny thicket that was a green facade between the two cottages, Neville anticipated the worst. These folk at regular hours was harrowing enough, but at morning meal? They must be lupine and ravenous. If he'd been younger, he would have fled for fear of being devoured.

He could only hope that a certain someone didn't open the door.

When he approached the abandoned and slightly-decrepit inn, he rapped meekly on the door, quivering greatly. Reluctantly it seemed, the door opened and a lank-haired, ashen, bespectacled stork of a young man immerged in rumpled day clothes. "Yes?" was the delicate inquiry.

"Um, hi, Ludwig. How's, um, testing drafts going?"

The question took a brief moment to calculate. "Oh, splendidly, splendidly," he shrugged off hurriedly in his monotone voice. "Is that it?"

For a second, Neville wanted to say yes. "No. Uh, Grandma wants to know if we could borrow some tea bags."

Another thin, perhaps a tad more florid and robust, face greeted him in chafing sports garb that revealed a very toned chassis. "Hallo, Neville."

"Um, hi, Midas." Well, so far so good. Midas wasn't that bad. In fact, he was quite good. Sport-devotee, but eccentrically jovial. 

"You wanted tea bags," Ludwig reminded him dully. "Well, how many? Oh, no bother, I recall. She wants six for her bridge party this afternoon. I haven't forgotten. All chamomile. Wait, please." He drifted off into the dank, musty hallway and far out of sight.

Midas grinned, flashing a mouth of stained and jagged teeth that made Neville cringe and battle an impulse to cling to his gums for his life. "So, what, you're fifteen now?"

"Yeah, fifteen."

"Isn't that something. Dorrit's just turned fourteen. Still a baby, I think. Very large baby, six feet tall like the rest of us now, but still a baby. You're at least five feet, right?"

Neville felt a twinge of resentment. "Of course!"

"Ah, should've guessed. Dorrit! Come say hello to Neville."

A looming girl with artificially blonde hair and mismatched pajamas drifted into the hallway. She flushed slightly. "Hi, Neville."

"Urg, hello," he sputtered. Not only was she six feet tall, but she'd shed quite a few rolls of fat, leaving a rather lean body. She'd also abandoned her smudge spectacles, and two slightly squinty sapphire eyes greeted him quite nicely. Such a pretty thing...and she'd always been just the window down. They'd never, naturally, fraternized (Even though his own social status was nothing to flaunt, he'd always thought himself above the flabby, mole-like Dorrit.), but now? He'd be opened to a chat....

"What are you all doing standing like a gaggle of dimwits in the doorway?"

Neville gaped and nearly swooned on the tattered doormat.

Robed in a billowing black dressing gown, Severus Snape drifted into the threshold and out onto the porch where Neville was stationed. He tilted his gold specs to observe Neville better before silkily greeting, with a stifled sneer, "Oh, hello, Neville."

Neville clamored for his inhaler. God, the man was frightening at seven in the morning. If Snape was his dad, he'd probably spend all of his life running and hiding in the shed.

Snape's irregularly angular eyebrows grazed his widow's peak forehead. He swiveled about and observed his two children rather expectantly. "Where's Ludwig?"

"Father," Ludwig replied, presenting Neville rather abruptly with a scarlet, palm-sized satchel of tea bags. 

"Have any of you invited Master Longbottom inside to join us at breakfast?" Snape goaded.

"No, it's okay, I already ate," Neville assured him hurriedly, backing away like a tiny mouse from a serpent. "Just getting these for Grandmum."

"Ah, yes. Do tell Cynthia that her flowers look spectacular, I always deemed them so. She's fairing well, I trust?"

"Um, yeah, she's great."

The word "yeah" seemed to make Snape shudder every time it was uttered.

Served him right for being such an uptight stuffed-shirt.

"Pleasant morn to you then, Neville."

Ludwig promptly shut the door.

Neville emitted a profound sigh of relief and tore into the woods, clasping the satchel in his tiny fingers.

Snape watched him zip off their property through the dingy windows with a trace of amusement.


	2. And She Talks Over the Sound

*Huzzah! Huzzah! And huzzah once more. Two reviews in less than twenty-four hours. That's jolly good fun.*

*Here are a few (for no true reason) very good CDs for writer/artist inspiration:

1.) "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" soundtrack

2.) Dido's "No Angel"

3.) Shakira's "Laundry Service"

4.) Pink's "Misundazstood" or something of that nature of spelling

*Oh yes. Do you know who I think would make the absolute perfect Viktor Krum if they ever made a fourth HP film? Ioan Gruffud. Type his name in the search box. He's so ultimately perfect! He's a little old, though. Anyhow.....

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And She Talks Over the Sound

Dorrit and Ludwig made a job of carrying the breakfast plates out onto the lawn, where Papa and Midas were stationed, Papa looking at the landscape with an air of distaste as he clucked his tongue absently, Midas plucking at the uncultivated bristles of his broomstick with a look of similar yearning.

"Gone a year and it's gone to seed already," Papa remarked plaintively with a gusty sigh. "I _do _think Cynthia's gardening genius is highly enigmatic. I can't do a thing with this beastly environment. She manages to make her house look like the damned Garden of Eden."

"Papa, she stays at home all year, what else is she to do?" Dorrit reminded him kindly as she peeled away the cheery tartan shroud wrapped around a large loaf of rye bread. "You actually have a vocation to keep you from your yard duties, a decent excuse."

"Nonetheless," her father trailed off hopelessly. "Midas, what exactly are you doing?"

"You know, Papa," Midas informed him puckishly, "I have a marvelous suggestion. Get rid of all these weedy flowers and make it into a nice Quidditch green."

Ludwig bristled. "Indeed!" he huffed, arranging a few preserve jars (mostly marmalade) beside the loaves of bread in a highly orderly manner. "Gone mad. Turn this post-aristocratic lawn into a sporting green, Dante Snape would cringe in his grave."

"Ludwig?"

He looked at Dorrit.

"You're such a irritatingly pompous fop sometimes."

Midas guffawed vigorously and Ludwig's sour complexion flamed ruddy. "FATHER!" he roared in an infuriated manner. 

"Yes, Dorrit," Papa chided with a stifled chuckle. "That was a horrible...(No, Ludwig, I'm not laughing at you)...horrible thing for you to say....(Midas, don't heckle your sibling, let him have his spectacles back)....Apologize right now, Dorrit....(Ludwig, I swear! Get that censorious countenance off your face this instant!)."

Ludwig looked pained and highly deceived. "You always side with them, Father, it's unjust!" he bellowed as Midas and Dorrit made a game of pitching his spectacles back and forth between them while he staggered about like an elderly mole. "Always!"

"I don't appreciate that tone," his father informed him smoothly. With a stealthy flourish of his hand, he plucked the spectacles out of their fingers and, after polishing them quite generously on his patched dressing gown, folded them and wrapped them in Ludwig's craning fingers. "Remember, you are their senior and must treat their puerile behavior"---Midas and Dorrit's eyes dilated at the word 'puerile', for the word (by instinct) highly affronts Snapes, and they contented themselves with tranquilly preparing their breakfasts--- "with a gentleman's dignity and suaveness."

"I understand completely, Father," Ludwig returned, magnifying his mammoth ebony eyes with the intense lenses of the spectacles before accepting a proffered dish of bread and three-berry jam with a condescending grin from Midas, who burbled something inaudible about being a nark and a pansy.

"Papa," Dorrit began after a few breaths of silence, "could we, by any chance, play Strike today?"

For what seemed to be the first time in eons, Snape saw a duplicate look of glee and entreaty in the eyes of both of his sons. 

"Don't the three of you have work to attend to?" he reminded them silkily.

Midas looked hesitant. "Well, a mite."

"A mite? Don't speak untruths to me, Midas, I'm a teacher and I am fully acquainted with how much work is issued over the summer break," Papa informed him delicately, but his voice held no ounce of upbraiding in it.

"But, Papa, we have ages and ages and...at least three days after ages and ages to do all of that nasty drivel!" Dorrit beseeched with a flutter of her mother's undiluted blue eyes. "And we never see you as much as we like, what with you instructing and all, and even when we play it at Durmstrang and educate our companions in the way of the game, it's still not as much good fun as when you play it with us!"

"Ah, you wouldn't want to play it with an aging man as myself...." Snape trailed off, pantomiming agony as he feigned kneading arthritic strain out of his dexterous fingers. "I'm turning forty within the month---"

The moans of imploring combusted as the three groveled before their father in mock-despair.

"Please, Papa, please---"

"C'mon, Dad, I'd be nowhere on the Quidditch field without you---"

"Do indulge, Father----"

With a quick bob of consent, Papa stood at attention in a billow of dressing gown. "Settled then. I'll join you in...three minutes time. I must change into a robe and collect my bloody broom, wherever I left it. I trust that when I return, you'll have cleared breakfast away?"

In a fervent clatter of saucers and flashes of tartan, the three scrambled about like ravenous vermin promised table scraps.

"Strike, Strike! We're playing Strike!" they chanted.

Snape couldn't suppress the genuine grin of delight he experience within. How good it was to have children of your own.

*I thought of Strike yesterday morning. It's not bad. Kind of interesting, actually. Agh, sorry this chapter's so short, but I'm just a tad fatigued at the moment. My reviewers are loved.* 


	3. Of the Cars that Pass Us By

*Oh dear! Was greatly appreciative of the reviews. Sincerely, I was. I've been trudging through a heinously vicious week. Was so glad that people were reading and loving my work. 

*I've just discovered something truly frightening: I actually **do** love the kid that played Neville in the movie. He was so adorable! I just wanted to hug him the whole movie, especially at the end when Dumbledore said he was courageous. And of course I'm agog over Snape. And Percy. Alan Rickman and Chris Rankin! Am obsessive compulsive.

*Did not realize Ludwig was such an attractive, appealing character, as was informed by reviewers. Hmm. Have created a lovable character! Am accomplished!

*As was informed, it's "She ROLLS the Window Down." Have made error. Am not perfect. Have surmised as much.

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Of the Cars That Pass Us By

"I can't believe you're making me spend the afternoon with them!" Neville squealed incredulously behind his bolted door. "Don't you even know that he hates me? I fail every single test of his! It's not fair! Why couldn't we live next to Professor Lupin or Sprout? I'd be much happier playing Scrabble with them than Strike or whatever that is with Snape spawn!"

Cynthia Longbottom patiently rapped on his door. "Neville, darling, you've been home almost two weeks and you've barely set a foot outside, save to water the plants. Honestly, it's time you started shedding the puppy pudginess."

"Gram!" Neville cried, highly insulted.

"Well, your father did and, oh, he was very attractive afterwards. I barely even recognized him, he was so dashing."

The promise of some woman considering him "dashing" almost forced Neville to capitulate for a brief instant, but he righted himself and informed his grandmother, almost defiantly, "I won't go."

Suddenly, there was a sound tapping on the front door. 

Neville toyed with the notion of unbolting the door. "Who is it, Gram?"

The scuffling noises on the other side of the facade meant she was soon to discover. After a brief intermission, he heard his grandmother gasp with practiced cordiality. "Why, hello, Dorrit!"

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Longbottom," the lass's part-cultured Welsh drawl, part-British brogue responded rather formally. "My father sent me forward to collect Master Longbottom. He will be joining us, correct?"

"Honestly, Dorrit, I couldn't say. Perhaps you could appease him, but he said he was detained at the moment."

Before Neville had a breath to mull over what he ought to do, there was a dull exclamation and a startled screech, followed by a sticky, suction-like plugging. Gram clucked her tongue exasperatedly. "That frog. It's going to be the premature death of me. Gets into everything: soups, potions, cereal, perfume, coat pockets, apron pockets."

"Where'd it go to?" He heard Dorrit's shoes making a bit of a frantic clutter on the stoop. "I don't want him to misplace it."

"Oh, he's always losing Trevor, don't mind him. He'll turn up sooner or later."

Neville, almost without his mind's consent, suddenly found himself plodding down the narrow corridor to the front-door, which was ajar and exposing the deliciously fresh environment into the dusky house's interior. Gram, clad in her paisley smock over her buttery ragweed robes and navy flats, was posed, arms akimbo, beside the threshold and was watching him approach with a solemn pride. Dorrit, grasping an almost ancient-looking broomstick and clad in almost dowdy-looking olive robes, was squeamishly inching her toes away from a nonchalant-looking Trevor, who was positioned at her feet.

"Oh, hello again," Dorrit murmured, looking a sight more tranquil when Trevor made his way down the minimal steps to the ground and took shelter in the dark curtains of a rose bush. "That's much better. Are you coming today?"

"Um...I guess I could....But I don't know exactly how to play Strike."

"It's the fundamentals of Quidditch warped and gored."

Neville's doe eyes dilated abruptly.

"Oh, you'll see. Come along, now."

Neville, without much hesitation, trotted after Dorrit's strides through the thicket partition between the two cottages and blended quite naturally into the lush jade leaves and boughs until he was hidden completely from his grandmother's sight.

Gram beamed quite nicely.

******

**__**

Strike

Expanded from the Young Minds Of: Galatea Rogan and Severus Snape, former Slytherin Beaters

Rules Written By: Midas Snape

Actual Form Written By: Ludwig Snape

Object: 1.) To strengthen Beater skills

2.) To annihilate your opponent

Strike is a warped and gored version of Quidditch. Two players must be Chasers; they must play using only one hand. Depending on how many more players, the rest will be divvied up onto two teams: Plato and Pollock. They act as Beaters. They too must use only one hand (club) to block the Bludgers from hitting the Chasers. Every time a Chaser is hit, the Chaser must fly a foot lower. The two Quidditch hoops are arranged on the top of two buildings, thus making the game more challenging for a player closer to the ground. The Chaser farthest from the ground after two hours wins.

"This sounds really....."

"What?"

Neville lowered the leaf of velum from under his eyes. "Hard."

Dorrit grinned quite benignly. "Candidly, it's simplistic." She was crouched on the brush-littered forest floor, lacing one of her scuffed brown boots. "It's just like Quidditch, only more horrific. Wonderful excuse to bash people in."

"Yeah, but...I can hardly stay on a broomstick," Neville admitted with a cringe, his rosy cheeks (which were already flushed from the horrendously balmy day) going crimson.

"Oh!" 

The way she said it informed Neville that the possibility of a human who wasn't skilled on a broom had never dawned on her. Her eyes darted from her boot to Neville's face to her soiled fingernails.

"Well, then this will be splendid practice for you," she chirped quite optimistically. 

After a few more steps, they found themselves in a feral, overgrown, unfenced garden with many sullen-looking willow trees and bitter-looking spruces. Midas was examining a battered leather case's contents quite thoughtfully in a few pieces of Durmstrang Quidditch garb. From the gilt crest on the face of the trunk, Neville surmised that it held the Quaffle, Bludgers, and Snitch. Ludwig was clutching a sinister hourglass, its curved glass bottom filled with indigo sand, and setting it beside the porch, muttering "Two hours precisely" in a rhetorical fashion. 

"Hallo, Longbottom!" Midas bellowed jovially. "Hey, Wig, where's Dad?"

Ludwig looked peeved. "Father," he replied condescendingly, "is about somewhere. I don't know the precise whereabouts."

"Good," Neville breathed darkly.

"I beg your pardon, Longbottom?" the frostiest tone he'd ever encountered demanded.

Crying out and stumbling over his own toes, Neville's head swiveled and he caught Snape behind him, hovering a good eight feet off the ground on a broomstick. He was standing on the body of the broom, shifting it back and forth with his feet, a trick that made Neville suppress a dry heave. He didn't even know people could accomplish something like that.

"Papa, have we an extra broom?" Dorrit inquired.

"Yes," was the succinct reply. With a Zen-like poise, Snape gently removed one foot from the broomstick in a childishly brazen manner. It was the first time Snape ever looked like he was sincerely not paying attention and enjoying himself. "Neville could use yours, I believe you're large enough to use your mother's, now."

"Papa, come down from there," Dorrit commanded reproachfully.

Snape complied. "Killjoy."

Within ten minutes, Neville and Dorrit had secured themselves brooms and the teams had been formed. Ludwig, Midas, and Neville were on Pollock, with Ludwig as the Chaser; Snape and Dorrit were on Plato, with Snape as the Chaser. At the same time, Snape and Ludwig released the Bludgers while Neville fumbled with the strap and finally emancipated the Snitch.

Goggling and barely participating for the first hour, Neville watched the four of them like stealthy ravens as they dipped through the air as if it were their birthplace. It now occurred to Neville why the entire clan was so scrawny: Strike had to be the most strenuous "game" in all existence! As the skirmish raged, he patiently observed films of perspiration coat their ashen faces and extreme hooked noses, which were perfect facsimiles of each other. 

Bizarre, really, how Snape managed to make the nose look like a farcical feature while it merely gave Dorrit's plain beauty a Grecian glamour. 

Snape must have heard Neville's thoughts or had at least seen him gawping at Dorrit, for as a Bludger whizzed past Dorrit's club and at his jaw, he hastily took the handle of his broom and, with an astounding crack, wielded it so it caused Neville to fly off his own broom and tumble onto the turf below.

"Agh!" Dorrit gulped.

"Get into the game, Longbottom!" Snape bit off jeeringly, eyes flaming malignantly. "Honestly, what the devil were you doing down there? It's been over an hour and you haven't done a blessed thing. I thought you were simply cursed in my class, but your lethargy is apparently nature."

Wobbling frantically as he ascended into the air once more, Neville watched with bated breath as Dorrit approached him by air in a timorous fashion. "You're fairing well, Neville. Just don't fear the Bludgers. Y-you'll be fine if it occurs to you that nothing will snag you if you're speedy." She gave a congenial wink, blushed horribly, and glided away with a few clandestine backward glances.

Neville felt a surge of thrill.

Suddenly, he heard the looming drone of an approaching Bludger. With a growl, he poised his club and _Crack!_ sent it wheeling through the air and towards Snape, who escaped it by a mere breath. Snape gawked incredulously, but there was a partially concealed glint of paternal elation in the murky depths of his eye.

For the next hour, Neville felt as if he'd done this sort of thing as second nature all his life. Ludwig and Midas were overtly awed by his dexterity with the new game. 

They lost by four points, but unanimously, his team agreed that that was merely because Neville was a neophyte to the game, and that alone. He certainly had the knack for it and was far more skilled than a great deal of the Durmstrang students were at it when they were first taught it.

Neville was so flushed and pleased that he accepted their invitation to another game the day after.

Dorrit expressed her profound glee that he'd done so well.

Neville was even sure that Snape was feuding with the notion of apologizing to him. He didn't. But when Neville left to go home for dinner at the hazy summer hour of seven-thirty, Neville was almost certain he heard him say "It was a pleasure having you here" when he left with sincere amiability. 

But he could have been wrong.


	4. And I Don't Know Why

*If any of my esteemed readers are inquisitive...I LOVE YOU, SEVERUS SNAPE! DON'T DIE IN ANY MORE OF THE BOOKS! I'D STOP READING THEM! 

*By the by... "Dogma" is on!!!!!!! Alan Rickman!!!!! Bliss in a film canister!

*This chapter is from Ludwig's point of view, for the ladies that love him.

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And I Don't Know Why

It was drawing close to the culmination of June and, as far as Ludwig was concerned, that was definitely satisfying for him. The Longbottom child was a tiresome nuisance in all meanings of the word "pest", and irritated him immensely. He'd totter around the house in his seemingly wild-eyed manner (especially in Ludwig's laboratory in the dank basement), prodding and squeaking in his congested manner "What's this?" "What does this do?" "Sorry! I didn't mean to do that!" "Do you want me to go away?" "Oh, what's this!"

And despite how exuberantly he pleaded with Father, the Longbottom child was not banned from entering the house. "Not for the boy's sake, by any means," his father assured him darkly, "but for Cynthia's needs. She bloody well knows nobody's queuing at the threshold to call on Neville, and I would damned well like you to associate with anybody if you were truly that disliked."

So the days past, and every time Longbottom came rapping on the front door, Ludwig scurried down the stairs to the basement and hurriedly bolted the disaster out of coming within twenty yards of him and his research. 

But one morning, he was not so fortunate. It was a dismal-weathered Thursday, rain showering the jade lawn and the gossamers of lightning flexing distinctly across the slate-colored clouds, and thus Ludwig thought Neville would not come. So he was leisurely dining at the breakfast table (a luxury he'd sacrificed for privacy) with Midas and Father, quibbling over the margarine as due custom, when there was a distinct scratching from the distant screen door in the farthest reaches of the pantry and a yowling of "Could someone let me in, pleeeeeeaaaasssseee?" that made Ludwig flinch.

"I do think it's that Longbottom chap," Midas proclaimed jovially. "Dad, can I let the waif in?"

"Please, Father, don't," Ludwig entreated, snatching the margarine pot from beside Midas's hand and liberally smearing his bread with it. 

"Come in, Neville," Father boomed loudly but without any true delight as the sopping boy schlepped in, muddy and stinking, an embarrassed flush on his cheeks. As Midas stood up in a truly gentlemen gesture to mop up the boy with a checkered rag by the coffee pot, Father (stealthily retrieving the margarine jar) informed Ludwig that he was not to work today, that he understood the boy's wishes for privacy, but it would be genteel to at least entertain company once.

"What am I to do with him?" Ludwig demanded tetchily. 

"You make him sound like a goldfish you were presented with and now have nothing to do with. Why not show him some pictures or something of that nature? He's thoroughly interested with the life of this house, and he's exhausted all the data he can from Dorrit. Plagues the poor thing night and day. By the by, where is that girl?" He rose. "Dorrit? Dorrit, darling, come down for breakfast."

No reply.

"Peculiar," Father mused in a somewhat apprehensive manner. "No matter." He swiveled around and a tiny sneer played on his crooked, thin lips. "Neville, whose wedding did you just attend? Aren't you garbed in a tad too proper manner for being with us?"

Overtly, Father was gesturing to the dress robes Neville was donning: crimson red with ebony lapels.

Within a breath, there were light footsteps at the summit of the stairs and Dorrit slunk downstairs in her own dress robes (ivory with velvet emerald gossamer sewn inside the sleeves) and a rope of pearls. She flushed deeply when she saw Neville and nearly combusted into flames when she caught the look of extreme astonishment on Father's face, who could only think back to the innumerable literal battles they had held ever since her mother died about wearing dress robes for any occasion.

"Good morning, Father," Dorrit greeted a tad feebly.

Father burbled something about his plan book and glided away to his study.

Even Ludwig wouldn't dare disturb him.

So, they spent the rest of the morning and a rather hefty portion of the afternoon doing as Father instructed: going through old albums. At first, Ludwig had thought he'd struck a vein of success, since most of the albums only concerned dully drifting photographs from the fifteenth century and the house itself, which he sensed were severely dulling Neville mindless. But when Father (around noon) immerged from his study and wordlessly set a few volumes of pictures Ludwig had never encountered before on the pantry table and returned to his quarters in the same manner in which he'd arrived, Neville began to kindle interest in them.

"These are far more recent than the others," Ludwig remarked rhetorically, thumbing through a few lilac-scented leaves. He then glanced at the spine. "Oh. Father's old yearbook from Hogwarts."

"That's _Dumbledore_!" Neville squealed triumphantly, his sticky fingerprint marring a picture of a careworn and slightly wily-looking man of the blossoming years of fifty, his ash-shocked tawny hair giving him the look of a debonair buccaneer or sailor.

"Who?" Dorrit inquired, inching her chair towards his and sitting beside him in what Ludwig would have deemed an almost cuddling manner.

"The Headmaster." Neville paused to blink rapidly when he took note of how Dorrit was positioned, his portly face cracking into a rather pleased beam. "He's great."

"Who's that?" Midas roared, his calloused finger brushing against the form of a younger woman of mid-thirties with bobbed hair of spun gold and delicate gold spectacles, who was grinning quite deviously with a flattered Dumbledore.

"God! That's _McGonnogal_! She's the head of our House, Griffindor."

"Ah, now, you see? You're the first Griffindor we've ever known," remarked Dorrit, dunking a cracker in a shallow saucer of milk in a thoughtful manner. "We've shaken hands with many, many, many Slytherins, though. Not quite...pleasant."

"Does Durmstrang have houses?" Neville posed, intrigued.

"Only three," Ludwig shook off nonchalantly. "Desocola, Annigar, and Nissim."

"Never date a Desocola," Midas advised haggardly. "Those girls have enough tragedy to make the Greeks squeamish. And if you date one, it's like you're dating nine of her alter egos. Besides, the lot of them are stupid bastards, weepy sort."

Dorrit gave him such a scowl. "If you don't _mind_ terribly pretending I'm not in the room....."

"That's no feat of strength."

Dorrit leered. "And we're not a stupid lot. Annigars are obtuse, let me assure you, Neville. Off on the Quidditch field, no time for books, letting the bravado and the testosterone swell----"

Midas looked bemused. "Thank you, m'darling."

"And the Nissims?" Ludwig goaded.

Dorrit and Midas feigned agony.

"Perfect pupils," Midas chirruped falsely, "just like you were."

"You know what we're insinuating...." Dorrit continued.

Ludwig looked complacent.

"Utterly dull," Dorrit finished.

"Is this _Snape_?!" Neville yelped.

"Who?" Dorrit echoed. "Oh, Papa. Let me see. It might be."

It was a picture of an angular, if not gaunt lad. Snape, already 6'3" by the year of his graduation, looked suave but disinterested in sweeping black robes with traditional but dated green piping: Slytherin House. He was at the foot of the long marble steps to the Astronomy Tower, hands resting on the banister, slick mop of jet hair smothering his scalding raven eyes. Beside him, a petite girl of Puerto Rican descent lay a tiny palm on his broad shoulder, which he seemed to be smiling at. She looked like the supreme foil of him: shapely if not a tad plump chassis, too broad and thin lips, alert brown eyes, lemming-like nose, sheet of scrubbed hair of a rich auburn acting like a shawl over her shoulders. Now and then, the portrait would move and the girl would grin joyously as the boy took her extended hand and showcased it to the viewer, revealing a silver-washed band with the tiniest diamond: an engagement ring.

"Mama...." Ludwig breathed, forgetting to address her as "Mother", as was his custom.

Midas looked unnerved. "Mom?" 

Dorrit beamed, her similar lips revealing her mother's unpleasantly large and snowy teeth. "It is! I didn't think we had many pictures like this left."

"Look, here's some more." 

"Longbottom," Ludwig exclaimed, "aren't those your parents standing with ours?"

"Wow! It is!"

"Look, someone wrote under it 'End of Year Prom. Soon to be: Frank and Judy Longbottom, Severus and Galatea Snape: Neighbors!'. Now, isn't that sweet. Your Mama was gorgeous, Neville, and you thoroughly resemble your Papa's every facet!"

"Thanks. God, they look so happy, I've never seen them look like that."

"Think they might have been chums once?" Dorrit mulled.

"Overtly, look, they're in every picture together," Ludwig replied thoughtfully. "Midas, come here."

"I think I'm gonna go outside and practice a bit!" Midas boomed loudly in a trembling voice, stumbling around for his broom. "Yeah, that's it, gettin' a little rusty that's all. I'll be back soon....Nah, sit down, Dorrit kid, I'll be back in a half-hour tops."

The backdoor bashed against the splintered wood paneling and he was off like a shot.

Neville looked gauche. "I don't get it."

"Oh, Neville...it's truly nothing....Well, it shouldn't be by now, at least..."

Neville's head swiveled about and he caught sight of Father looming in the murky depths of the room, the mauve ducts under his eyes (badges of his ever-present war with chronic insomnia) prominent in the hearth. 

"Their mother," he continued in a polished and delicate manner, "passed on five years ago, as I'm sure you were told....Bone marrow cancer. It was rapid. Too rapid for our means to deal with. As I'm sure it's quite evident to you, we're not a wealthy clan, though we feign it quite exceptionally. 

"We quested for a match for years, and Midas was the only one we found. We were delighted....But he was a fragile, sickly child then and had contracted pneumonia in such a severe way that there was truly no way he would have survived the transaction."

He looked grave. "He still finds fault within himself for it. Will it heal, I cannot tell. I can pray, but....Nothing is set in stone." 

Ludwig marveled at the bearing with which Father prodded at his own battered nerve and divulged what prayed so frequently on his tattered mind. Mother's death was devastating to Father; he still wore nothing but those dowdy black mourning robes. Ludwig had only been fourteen when his mother's death had come and gone, but at times he still fought to draw up a memory of his father smiling with tragedy or wearing colors besides black.

He'd once worn so many colors.

Neville looked almost at tears himself. "I'm sorry," he professed with an elderly sympathy.

Father's grave face sagged, swiftly accentuating the many lines about his mouth, eyebrows, and eyes that were usually taut with censure or wry glee. "I do appreciate that, Longbottom," was the soft reply. "Good afternoon, then."

Father left as gently as he'd come.

*For those of you who have trouble picturing Galatea, think of Maya from _Just Shoot Me_. Tell me if this is too hokey. 


	5. But She's Changed My Life

*Am sorry for the wait. Writer's block, you understand. 

*I would like to bring the Malfoys and Death Eaters into this plot...if the Snapes don't mind. (laughs)

Snapes: (irritably) We do.

Holly go lightly: (raising eyebrows) Oh...right. So, any insight....

****

Chapter Five

But She's Changed My Life

"....And I'm really, really, really bad at Potions, but I'm sure your dad's already told you that a billion times," Neville finished with a shift of his left shoulder.

Dorrit made a droning little "hmm" buzz, batting at a peroxide-shocked lock of hair that'd escaped from the disciplined knot on the crown of her regal skull. "Only periodically. But you are correct in your assumption." 

"What assumption?"

Dorrit used a pewter spoon to balance another morsel of vanilla ice into a crudely fashioned wooden mug that looked as if it could've been constructed in the Dark Ages. "That my father speaks of people behind their backs, of course," she admitted with utter simplicity as if remarking upon the fact that he preferred cream to milk. "But it's not horrible, in any rate. We all do it from time to time, I suppose. If it suits his purpose, I really have no standing to upbraid him." She demurely fiddled with the glinting foil wrapper of a chocolate frog. "He's a very good man about most things, anyhow."

Neville's downy fair eyebrows grazed his low hairline in mild incredulity, but he made no further remark, as Ludwig made an entrance out onto the back porch, looking severely dour and highly irritable, feathery fumes of the lightest maroon trailing from his heels and fingertips.

"I thought the both of you were supposed to be weeding," he remarked peevishly in an air Neville wouldn't have classified as the culturing of Severus Snape, rather the petulant sneers of an older brother figure.

Dorrit's eyes darted about the screened porch with vague intent. The floor's rotted boards were shrouded by tattered paisley dusters and moldering papers. Through gashes in the mesh, jade boughs of both shrubs and climbing ivy poked through in the manner of irritating neighbors and sniveling relatives at Christmas. But Dorrit and Neville were sprawled in the manner of a Flying Car advertisement, encircled by florid sacks of candy pilfered from Durmstrang before the end of term and tall hogsheads of flavored ice, paying little to no heed to how outdoors was gradually becoming indoors. 

"And ought you be working?" Dorrit returned in a justified manner, gnawing impishly on a licorice wand with strawberry cream stuffing.

"A man may take a day of leisure, if he so chooses....."

"Oh, you botched something up and you're looking for Dad," Dorrit tittered dully. Using her fingers to mimic the austere spectacles on his Grecian profile, she altered her already dramatically deep and light tone of voice to a shockingly flawless one of Ludwig's. "I dare say, Father, it looks as if I'm a little muddled. I've managed to disintegrate the pipes again. Oh, bother!"

Ludwig's lower jaw jutted like a ashen peninsula and his eyes radiated a look of supreme resentment. "Impertinent."

"Impertinent," Neville echoed like a pleased little myna bird. "Do you always talk like you're sixty-five?"

Candidly, if you want to know the truth, Ludwig _did_ articulate in a bit of an ancient vernacular and he was very, very aware of it. But he did so in good intentions, as to pay homage to his greatest idol, his father, a man he was so keen to mature to be. And from this desire yielded an inexorable pride in it, so Neville's little quip barely even skinned his elbow. With a dry leer, he exited in the manner he'd come: censorious and dignified. 

Until he stumbled over a bump in the long hallway carpet and emitted a loud "Shit!" in the process. 

"He's so quaint when he's pissed." Dorrit displayed her rather broad teeth once more before covering them once more to purse her lips in a contemplative manner. "You want to know a secret?"

Neville consented and agreed that he did.

"I've never, ever spoken to a boy before."

Neville looked alarmed. "Why?"

"I don't know. They just...don't seem to ever want to speak with me, that's all. To my friends, oh yes, of course. But not with me."

"It's probably because you're so tall."

"Really? You truly think so?" Dorrit sounded intrigued and a tad flattered that the error wasn't completely of her own doing.

"C'mon, you're really tall. I'd never talk to you. Look at me. I'm, like, a hobbit."

Dorrit grinned into a fistful of multicolored cherry pellets.

"For better or worse," he finished. "Girls never talk to me either."

"That's because you look so frightened of them," Dorrit informed him gently. "When I saw you at the beginning of the summer term, you looked apt to bolt every time you saw me. That's not a major welcome to girls."

"Oh, really?" he sighed wryly. "Hobbit quality."

"And who calls you 'hobbit'?"

Neville looked morose and bleak, but he continued to nibble heavily on a cluster of peanut brittle. "Deanthomasn'RonWeasley," he slurred, mortified.

"They sound like utter morons to me," she informed him with a puckish grin that Neville was beginning to grow more and more fond of, something that looked startlingly attractive on such a wide mouth with such curiously white and sturdy teeth. Overtly, a trait bestowed unto her from Galatea, as Snape's own thin mouth and stained teeth would not have fabricated such a mouth.

Dorrit eyed him expectantly, her eyes dilated so that the lids were pinned against the brow bone. "Well?" 

Neville blinked out of reverie. "What?"

Dorrit looked crestfallen. "Aren't...." She floundered for the appropriate verbalization. "It just looked like you might....I've never...." She flushed, looking both vaguely coquettish and a hue domineering all in the same look. "You want to kiss me?"

"Um." 

Oh dear. Neville had never contemplated _kissing_ Dorrit. That is, he was fond of her, very fond of her, enjoyed her company immensely, found her absently attractive, but he never ever came to the conclusion of an inevitable kiss. To be frank, he'd never kissed a girl in his entire life, and was therefore ignorant of the courting and evident signs of a woman wanting to be kissed. 

So, his entrails as deadened as the porch planks upon which they sat, he merely reiterated the same word in the manner of a horrible carousel over and over and over again:

"Um....Um....Um...."

Dorrit suddenly loomed to her father's height and seemed to take on that horrific sneer he bore whenever he met Neville in a school corridor or marked one of his term papers or cattily remarked upon the tincture of his potion. Neville almost asphyxiated in dread and repulsion. 

"_Why don't you just get off the porch, Longbottom, and leave me the heck alone_?!" she demanded rhetorically. "_Why don't you just go the heck home, you podgy little cunt? Get the heck out of my face!_"

Without forewarning, Snape glided through the threshold, fingering his goatee with an air of slight amusement and absent wariness. "Is that you making such a din, Dorrit? Whatever is the matter?"

"You can both shut the heck up!" 

"But he didn't say a word," Snape returned pointedly.

Dorrit's pallid forehead crinkled as she glowered. "You know, Dad," she bit off frigidly as she stalked away, "that slimy goatee makes you look like a bloody old man!"

"Why however did you know I wanted to look like one of your grandfather's friends? That was so very, very kind of you to remark upon it."

Dorrit had disappeared into the hall, only to stumble over the same flaw in the hallway carpet and bark "Oh for bloody's sake!" before flinging herself out the front door and out of sight.

Snape then turned on Neville with a countenance of great amusement. "Just when you thought her mother's temper had died too. What did you do?"

"Um....Um...." Neville stammered.

"That's exactly what I always said to Galatea," Snape sighed whimsically, a tiny grin of mutual befuddlement on his usually stoic visage. "It's all men really can say to save their hides, really. What else are we capable of, really? We're the weaker sex, boy....Always have been, always will be."

Neville couldn't even smile, he was so hollow with alarm. But Snape's meaning was present in his mind, and did make him feel a trifle better.

Welcome to the world where men don't understand a bloody thing about women anymore.


	6. It's Time to Keep Living

*Chapter titles are now from _Pippin_. I love that musical....

*Thank you as well for the thirty reviews. I never thought I'd be so popular.

*Snape's owl is named Sallieri. Guess why. If you've ever seen _Amadeus_, you'll know.

__

Chapter Six

It's Time to Keep Livin'

Dear Gram,

It's the third day of Aunt Amelinda's expedition, and would you believe it, I haven't lost Trevor once! Thank you so, so, so much for letting me go to an Indonesian harpy reserve for a week with Aunt Amelinda to watch the yearly bloom of the Cherub-Kissed Sanvitalias, which Indonesian harpies have thrived on for eons. A week in Indonesia is going to be great!......

***3***

"Can't believe the old man here's turning forty," Midas remarked almost rhetorically, eyeing his father rather impishly. Dare he press to take another witting jab? At Midas's glance, his father presented him with such a fierce look of hostility in return that Midas emitted a leery and somewhat penitent whistle and began to feign interest with an array of beach wood spice trays, though what a lusty, robust sportsman such as himself would do with a selection of beach wood spice trays was beyond his fathoming. In any rate, he wasn't willing to receive the scalding chastisement his father would deliver if provoked to extremes. His father's fondest joy was to mortify a child if he so spoke out of turn, however benign he was at times, as a qualm of discipline. Though Midas had taken the rebuke in the past with no more than a fleeting flush, in his upper teens (and in the public presence of so many females there in the shop in Diagon Alley), he was more than keen to keep quiet and not impair his father's enigmatically and highly erratic sour temperament.

"Forty," Ludwig announced grandly and seemingly covetously, "is a remarkably admirable age."

"Rightly put," Midas confirmed as an act of contrition. "Forty years of greatness. Here, here. Raise a glass."

"Would the pair of you mind terribly being a shade more discrete?" their father hissed irately, his hollow, almost lantern-jawed countenance becoming rather ruddy near the jutting cheekbones of his face. "Not speaking of me as if I were moldering and deceased? Let's leave, then, if you're so hearty in persisting in such actions."

Ludwig, Midas, and Dorrit (who was mooning over a row of amber-bound Elfin love chronicles in a mournful manner) shared a rather alarmed glance. Their father? Leave Eusebius's Potions Stockroom without purchasing so much as a vile of hair oil? When there was a clearance sale? Oh dear. There was something amiss. He hadn't performed so harrowing a feat since he first heard Mother was diagnosed with bone cancer. Yet without so much as a cocked head, they filed out in silent unison, somber as monks.

As soon as Father's foot grazed the cobblestones, a strident squeal made him flinch.

"_Mama_, can we _please_ go see the pretty flowers?"

"Nona, don't case a scene and wake the----"

"But they were_ pink_, Mama! Pink _and_ green stripes! The lady said they were extotic!"

"_Exotic_, Nona, and no."

Sallieri, Father's owl (who was hovering about his head most imperatively), descended upon his extended forearm and gave Nona and her mother an almost censorious glower.

"What's the list say, Ludwig?" Dorrit droned. "What else do we need?"

"Soap."

"Soap. Soap. Christ, where do we get soap?"

"Well, we could get it back as Eusebius's, but it's so pricey there and it smells like boxwood," Midas mulled. "Bit like the stench of cat piss."

"It keeps well, though," Ludwig mused.

"Darby's is having a sale on bath supplies," Dorrit remarked.

"That's feminine soap, Dorrit."

"Come off it, Ludwig, soap does not have a gender."

"But it's _pink_."

"I _like_ pink. Besides, if it's such a woman's color, why are the Pollock's Penguins' team colors pink and maroon?"

"Because they're fops," Midas informed her.

"Well, their Chasers _are_ rather tiny, but I thought they were Mandarin."

"Vood you lik to come een?" a guttural voice inquired rather compellingly.

Dorrit discovered that she was loitering on the stoop of a shop that looked a bit like it was constructed of the shell of a milk chocolate Easter egg: flawless and reassuring, yet enticing nonetheless. She glanced up at the clerk: a haggard, maternal-looking, slender woman with eyes that were far too miniscule and close to be attractive. 

"Um, no, sorry," Dorrit gushed, cheeks going ruddy. 

"I haff just opened my store last veek," she notified them, as if the announcement would change the situation in any manner. 

"Sorry, we really have to go."

"Vood you lak to come een?" she pressed, those miniscule eyes latching onto their father's.

Dorrit observed the ill-tempered ions in his complexion fizzle into extinction and be replaced with a visage of utter child-like innocence. Most unusual. Almost as if he hadn't a conviction in his mind. Then he produced somewhat of a gauche attempt at a nonchalant chuckle, identical in quality to the ones of Ludwig's when he was making conversation with Penelope Clearwater at his place of work, the girl he was so infatuated with.

"Me? No, no, I-I don't know if I ought to, pressing matters, you understand." His eyes took to lingering about the shop's elaborately furnished display window. "I daresay, those flowers are extraordinarily breathtaking, are you a florist?"

The woman ascended the stairs in a presentation of featureless, matronly lavender robes with good-natured soil-spoiled blemishes on the knees. " _Mein Name ist Phoebe Kittle und dankt Ihnen, sie sind nett, nicht sind sie?_" (a/n: **My name is Phoebe Kittle and thank you, they are nice, aren't they?**)

Ludwig, the only child present with a decent and passing comprehension of German, listened with avid intentness to the following dialogue, while Dorrit and Midas exchanged giddy looks at their father's enchantment.

"_Sehr reizend. Ich bin Severus Snape. Deutscher, sind Sie?" _(a/n: **Very lovely. I am Severus Snape. German, are you**?)

Kittle looked highly pleased. "_Komplimente auf Ihrem fehlerlosen Akzent. Und ja, Hamburg. Vor meine Söhne und ich gerade verließen vier Monaten._" (a/n: **Compliments on your accent. And yes, Hamburg. My sons and I just left four months ago.**) She flexed her broad eyebrows. "_Sind jene Ihre Kinder?_" (a/n: **Are those your children?)**

"_Nein, sklaven._" (a/n: **No, slaves**.) 

Kittle rolled her eyes. "_Ehrlich haben wieviele Leute diesen Witz gezogen? Gott, wie Mann banal ist._" (a/n: **Honestly, how many people have pulled that joke? God, how banal is man**.)

"I think Papa likes her," Dorrit remarked in a hush.

"It's about time he dated again," Midas muttered. "And he's lucky. Usually, he gets paired up with all those flaky, twenty-something bimbos that work at Hogwarts. Least she's his age. Maybe a little older."

"And with a decent name, Phoebe. How many times has he courted a woman named 'Evania' or 'Zulieka' or something similarly and atrociously queer?" Ludwig chimed. 

"Vood you all lak to come een? Nut to buy, just to seet down," Phoebe enticed maternally, her eyes benign and intrigued. 

"It could be arranged," Father murmured delicately, his eyes distant and fresh with past emotions.

Dorrit vowed not to read too much into the situation as she entered the shop. After all, this was merely a greeting, nothing was set in stone between these two----

"_OH-, für Christsakes!_" Phoebe yowled irritably, glancing at a leaf of the _Daily Prophet_. "Dat wretched Harry Potter. Dey act lak dis child sneezes marble pillars. Vot a vaist of a front page!" She wrung the carbon newspaper, questing for a waist basket. "Ugh. 'Help, help! Dey are trying to kill me! Help me!' Honestly, if so many people are trying to kill him, perhaps dere is a reason, _ja_?"

Midas gaped in astonishment. "We've found the missing link."

*This was more venting than anything else. I'm so tired of reading all of these romances concerning Snape and a student or a 'twenty-something bimbo' with a bizarre name. Really! Think about it! Snape is_ forty_! By the fifth book, he will be _forty_! Let's be realistic. And think about it: how would you feel if _your_ dad was a sex idol at forty? And this is all real German in the story. Hey, guess what this phrase is?

~*~*~*~*_Pity-clearly-frei, Ruhm ist nicht alles.*~*~*~_

(**Pity---clearly, fame isn't everything**.)

Charming, _ja?_


	7. With You

*I must deliver two formal apologies to my readers: firstly, for my appallingly revolting German (twas not my fault, I must scorn www.dictionary.com's loathsome translator that I went trigger-happy over) and for the long, long pause in plot. In the words of Erik the Phantom of the Opera, someone I highly revere and who I honestly think would make a good companion for Severus dahling, "Oh, forgive me!" And in the words of Eric Cartman of _South Park_, who I think would make a marvelous Slytherin, "Dude, I'd be afraid, too. You're mom's a effing beeoch."

*Now that I'm pondering, PTO watching Snape's children would be hilarious. They'd turn into the Addam's Family. And Cartman in Potions class would be priceless.

****

Chapter Seven

With You

The single woman of the Snape manor padded into the pantry in a highly reverent fashion, serene but notoriously deceptive sapphire irises darting about the breakfast array most tenderly. Bless her father's doting little heart when he concocted breakfast every Sunday morning; he was a chum and a hearty good fellow among-----

"**_What the hell have you done_**?!" Papa bellowed, his equally misleading ebony irises now aflame with amber lividness. He looked utterly sinister in his somewhat tatty dressing gown: a grim, featureless jet affair secured with a palm-wide belt rather than the foppish Victorian sash that had been made for it. 

Dorrit did not even flinch. "I gave it a simple red-rinse," was the tranquil return as she displayed the left side of her skull with dull intent. "Honestly, Papa, it's my head of hair, ought I be at liberty to do with it what I may?"

"**_And what is bloody wrong with it's original shade of the ever-classic black, Dorrit Roganich Snape?!_**" he roared. Midas, who had casually strolled into the pantry with exuberant buoyancy behind his father's trembling frame, caught sight of the melee at hand and tactfully retreated back into the recesses of his attic bed chambers with a steak knife and a pomegranate to accommodate his imploring belly. Breakfast would wait. 

"Oh, Papa," Dorrit clucked in an almost haggard fashion. "We've encountered this brawl before. Remember when I returned home last year a platinum blond? You really ought to attempt to be more bohemian and liberal, it's only hair. And to inform you, nothing is wrong with black, it flatters you so well, Papa. I just thought a woman who resembles her male offspring so distinctly deserves to have a hint of original panache. And are those sugar scones I detect in the room or is that the scent of Valhalla, my dear paternal one?"

**__**

"Which one of your repulsive little Durmstrang cronies set you up to this? Was it Lou?" her father urged incessantly, one hand palling the dish of scones she'd been ogling. 

Dorrit cowered a tad. Bully. She had hoped that her last little quip would have made him chuckle and set the matter aside, at least until she'd stolen a scone. No matter. "Lou? Why, Papa, whatever do you---?"

" **_ Belay delivering your devious little falsehoods, Dorrit Roganich Snape! Lou Iberon, Simon Ingall, and Esther Perkins are insufferable brats, their parents not even a hint better!_**"

"Just because they aren't Jewish, Papa-----"

"**_That's highly not the situation matter, Dorrit! Now was that-that rusty substance out of your scalp and let that be the end of it!"_** Dorrit glowered. "Judging by my utter lack of fortune," her father hissed frigidly, "it's permanent, isn't it?" Dorrit suppressed a beam of conquest. "No matter. I have two methods to contend with this crisis. It might be of great interest to you that an infusion of sulfur, topaz fragments, and lemming dung is an excellent method for hair-color restoration, though the stench is less than dainty." Dorrit pulled a miffed countenance. "Right then." Her father's hand flew to a low drawer and delved through the belly of it in a sinuous manner before extracting a gleaming implement. "Scissors. Off with her tresses."

"Papa, don't pull such a revolting pun."

Her father looked resolute: There had been no pun intended. "Hair is a thriving creature, and to have it restored to its genuine tone, it must be allowed to flourish fresh once more." He approached her, shears flexed. "Unless the sulfur and topaz brew is looking more appetizing----" 

Dorrit presented him with a glance seething with defeat. "Make it so."

"Splendid, Dorrit. Breakfast, as is entitled, will be fully prepared in a virtual three minutes. Ah, dear, then after morning meal, you wouldn't mind dreadfully cladding yourself in those pine robes from your grand-aunt, would you, my darling?"

"I _abhor_," Dorrit drawled, "the pine robes."

Her father looked adamant. "You _cherish_," he corrected, "the pine robes."

"They smell of boxwood," she glowered somewhat cantankerously. "She smells of boxwood as well, if your memory is flickering."

"She's an doddering specimen of a woman, that's what they smell of. For certain, a century from now, your great-grandson, Severus, will be remarking with great disdain upon your odor."

"What is the called-upon occasion?"

"My birthday party, of course."

Dorrit gawped, nonplussed. "I beg your pardon?" she echoed in a rasping, bewildered tone. The man looked lightly peevish, but still managed to extract three sunny yolks from a pewter basin with simplistic perfection, each yolk a flawless orb of canary-yellow, unbroken. He went about whisking the sloshing contents of the pewter bowl, locking eyes in a goading manner with his perplexed daughter. "B-but you don't have parties, Papa."

"Child, do not **tell** me what I **do** and **do not have**!" he snipped, suppressing a snarl. His eyes then blunted to a shade more cultured. "In any event," he continued in less than a murmur, "it ought not be so terrible for you, one of your playmates since infancy will be present, and won't that be delightful?"

Dorrit fumbled about with a crystal shot glass of cantaloupe extract. "Depends...." she slurred thoughtfully. 

"Come now." He gingerly laid a finger upon her burgundy head. "By the by, this...hair stain, it shan't come off on my palms?" Dorrit gave him such a vicious leer that he said no more. "Gregaufield?"

Dorrit jolted, stunned and thrilled. "Gregaufield Malfoy?" she reiterated, incredulous.

"You mustn't call him that, he prefers to use his middle name as his first, though I must be true to you, darling, Draco is truly a bit farcical in my humble estimation." His lashes flickered, bemused. "Darling, say something or at least extract your elbow from the butter pad."

She emitted such a strident yelp that Sallieri shuddered on his perch, his stately but irregular flecked plumes fanning out in supreme irritation. Before her poor father could scramble away to shelter, she embraced his seemingly emaciated frame with maidenly gusto, producing a feminine little click that men recognize as sounding like, "EeeeEeP!" followed by a garbled, shrill chirruping.

"I'm sorry, I didn't catch that," her father prodded, a tad put off.

"Thankyi, thankye, thankyi, thankye!" she chanted like some frenzied high priestess of Isis, her lank limbs flailing about exuberantly, murky eyes dilating furiously.

Her father gave her an unsettling glare of disdain. "You know," he breathed lethally, "what I think of the two of you---"

"Papa---"

"--together," he continued. "I remember unfavorably---"

Dorrit's eyelids flared back rather irately.

"---what he said and did to you last year, have you gone senile, by any chance?" His slender fingers drummed a rapid tattoo on his thigh in a rippling motion.

Dorrit's breath came quickly. "I was thirty pounds heavier," she informed him. His eyes darted to hers rather cynically. "Half a foot smaller." The eyes looked undaunted. "Bespectacled and oily with ghastly platinum hair."

"You have always looked attractive to me."

"That's because you're my father," she bit off ruefully. He thumbed his aquiline nose thoughtfully before taking to fiddling with the gold spectacles on the crown of his regal skull. "Were you not the parent that revered those who conquered and realized their thirsts?" The rippling pale fingers fidgeted with the spectacles in solemn response, yet Dorrit sensed he had no notion of yielding to her debates. "I've always craved to have Gregaufield pay more than mandatory and cordial attention to me, of this you are greatly aware. Why not let me attempt in doing so?"

Her father presented her with a grim, somber, death's head countenance. "Do as you will," he droned in a deaden voice. He then approached the pantry stove and turned off the stove. "There. Breakfast. If it suits you."

"I'd...rather not, I'd like to be...trim for his arrival."

Her father did not show his expression to her, but he seemed openly irritated, arms akimbo and weight shifted.

"Never mind," she whispered, shuffling forward to set breakfast on a set of periwinkle saucers, attempting to shroud her befuddled emotions on the matter.

******

Dorrit was perched atop an aged Gothic ebony chair in her bedroom, an amethyst and jet encrusted emerald-cut mirror hovering before her, a Palo orb between her fingers, gleaming like a suspended gem of sun. Her father looked on thoughtfully.

She grazed one side of the Palo orb with her index finger. The Palo orb shuddered, anticipating her tremulous voice. "Gregaufield Draco Malfoy," she instructed it in a gravelly murmur.

Her father mooned over her freshly-scoured scalp, which was gradually returning to her birth-given color, a slick graphite, in an attempt to showcase his reluctance to attend the showing.

A flaxen-haired lad in rich robes with a tip-tilted nose and malignant eyes of an electric ice appeared. His blossom-like lips parted in speech. "Really, Pansy, I wouldn't worry too much about me going to visit Snape over the summer, I have to, it's a stupid family thing. It's so boring. Your parents are friends with mine, they're probably coming, too. But it's going to be a rather cool affair. You know Snape's a traitor. Everyone knows he's trying to get back with the Dark Lord before he loses his head. I would too, dumb old idiot." Dorrit ran a tongue over her lips and lowered the pupils of her eyes. "Or at least that's what my dad thinks. And everybody _knows_ that he'll be taken back. He was the Lord's Supreme Assistant. That's how Pettigrew got the job, he left. If I was doing the judging around here, I wouldn't take him back. I wouldn't!"

"At least he isn't as dim as his mother," her father murmured airily. Dorrit glanced up and stayed the action of the Palo ball. Her father met her gaze in the looking glass. "Well, he's correct in his assumptions, in any case. I _am _terrified, but the idea was not of my mind, rather that of Albus'. Bit of a means to gather up evidence like clusters of sweetheart roses, don't you think?"

Dorrit eyeballed his robed forearm warily. "Was it scorching?" she inquired delicately.

"The Dark Mark, you mean?" He subconsciously jerked at the fringe of his sleeve, ruddy patches of embarrassment dappling his sallow skin in the looking glass. "Why, yes. It has been...for quite some time. Gone black, if you care to look. No? Well...I wouldn't look at it if I was at liberty to choose."

"Severus?" Her father looked petulant and ruffled. "Papa. It's been irking me for---" She paused. "What will the Dark Lord do if he suspects your resistance?"

"Oh, I don't know, death, perhaps. That doesn't make you dramatic, does it, the plausible reality that my death could be at hand?"

"Not truly, no."

"Good girl, then. You know that in that event of my death, you would take up housing with your godfather?"

"Filius Flitwick, I do recall. Will he be attending your birthday celebration?"

"He shall not be present, he lacks the invitation." He gestured to the Dark Mark, unseen but looming, upon his forearm. 

They chortled remorsefully.

"Shall I take the Palo orb back to the den?"

"Please." Dorrit cleared the screen and presented it to him.

"Good girl." He floated towards the threshold of the door before taking an intermission. "Er, darling?"

Dorrit started as if he had never been there, eyes dilated and a smidge startled.

"Do try not to anticipate young Malfoy so. I do recall that you are quite infatuated with him, but he has harmed you so in the past that---"

She looked crestfallen by his words.

Against his better judgment and not for the first or last time, Severus Snape halted his words. "---Things are bound to improve between the two of you , darling. Best wishes."

If one stumbles upon a mongrel who is charmed with his abuser, can one say much to dissuade it?

*Forgive me for the long wait. Writer's block. 


End file.
